International

The 30-year-old U.S.-Iran enmity is no longer a phenomenon; it is an institution. For three decades, politicians and bureaucrats in both countries have made careers out of demonizing each other. Firebrands in Iran have won political points by adding an ideological dimension to an already rooted animosity. Shrewd politicians, in turn, have shamelessly used ideology to advance their political objec­tives. Neighboring states in the Persian Gulf and beyond have taken advantage of this estrangement, often kindling the ﬂames of division.

Israel and some of its supporters in the United States, in particular, have feared that a thaw in U.S. relations with Iran would come at the expense of America’s special friendship with the Jewish state.

But the strategic cost to the United States and Iran of this pro­longed feud has been staggering. Harming both and beneﬁting nei­ther, the U.S.-Iran estrangement has complicated Washington’s efforts to advance the peace process between the Israelis and Palestin­ians in the 1990s, win the struggle against al-Qaeda, or defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and the insurgency in Iraq. Still, the strategic cost of this enmity has oftentimes been dwarfed by the domestic political cost to overcome it.,,,[read the full article…]

…The vertical lines show the range of taxes paid by Americans in various income brackets. As you can see, wealthier people generally pay more taxes. There is some overlap, but the overlap is pretty tiny in a country of 250 million people. “Roughly a quarter of all millionaires (about 94,500 taxpayers) face a tax rate that is lower than the tax rate faced by 10.4 million moderate- income taxpayers (10% of the moderate-income taxpayers),” the report concludes. No one has yet scored exactly how many taxpayers will be effected by Obama’s Buffet Rule proposal, which would essentially establish a 30% alternative minimum tax for those who make more than $1 million a year. But it is a safe bet that it is in the same ballpark. In other words, we are only talking about roughly 94,500 families getting a tax increase, or roughly as many people as live in Hillsboro, Oregon.Obama is pitching the Buffett Rule as having major savings potential. “If the country was in a surplus like it was back in 2000, I’d understand us saying, well, let’s try to let millionaires keep every last dime,” he said in Iowa. “I get that. But that’s not the situation we’re in. And so we’ve got to make choices. Do we want to keep investing in everything that’s important to our long-term growth — education, medical research, our military, caring for our veterans — all of which are expensive? Or do we keep these tax cuts for folks who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them? Because we can’t do both.”